Biography
Les Guthman is an American director, writer and production executive, who has the distinction both of having produced three of the "Top 20 Adventure Films of All Time," according to Men's Journal, and having won the National Academy of Science's nationwide competition to find the best new idea in science television, which lead to his production, "Three Nights at the Keck," with John Lithgow.
He is producer, director, writer and editor of the feature documentary, "LIGO," and an eight-episode web series in collaboration with Caltech, M.I.T. and the LIGO Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation, MathWorks and Caltech. Guthman and his crew were on location shooting the documentary, when the LIGO project made the first historic detection of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes - a discovery National Geographic named at the top of its list of the "Top 20 Discoveries of the Decade," and which earned Kip Thorne, Rai Weiss and Barry Barish and almost immediate Nobel Prize in 2017. "LIGO" was finished in March 2019. The YouTube series, "A Discovery That Shook the World," continues in production.
Mr. Guthman created and produced the "Discover Magazine" series at Disney, and then created and produced Outside Television, the production division of Outside magazine; where his productions received two Emmy Nominations -- for Outstanding Documentary and Outstanding Camerawork (on Mt. Everest) -- along with multiple film festival awards.
Mr. Guthman has produced 41 feature documentaries, directed 13, written 13 and has edited 12 feature documentaries, along with writing, producing, directing and editing more than 20 shorter video productions. In 2008, he launched the XPLR channel for webcasting adventure, environmental and science documentaries in partnership with Ted Leonsis' SnagFilms.com.
He was chief creative advisor to the Annenberg Foundation in 2006-2007, heading its documentary and web production initiative, Explore Annenberg.
In 2008, he licensed all of his Outside Television documentaries and created the XPLR Channel on Ted Leonsis' pioneering streaming site, Snagfilms, to stream adventure, environmental and science films.
He began his career as a story editor of the Peabody Award-winning series, "Visions," on PBS; and spent a decade at NBC News in New York as a producer and writer for Tom Brokaw, as well as NBC News Manager of Political Analysis.
